[Bug 59695] Re: High frequency of load/unload cycles on some hard disks may shorten lifetime

[Bart Samwel]

Ryan Waldroop wrote:
> @ Felipe:
> 
> Actually, with further testing, my laptop appears to be fixed while on AC
> power, but it's still cycling a lot on battery.  The wiki page linked in the
> opening bug post has a three step process to check if everything is fixed
> and change the values if you like.  For me, I didn't want everything set to
> 255, so I set both AC and Battery to 254.  This seems to be working well for
> me.

The fix that has now been applied is the Debian fix, which purposely
leaves the power management (and therefore the cycling) enabled when the
laptop is working on battery. This is for safety reasons: it is assumed
that the laptop is working on battery when it is being carried around,
and it is much safer to park the heads in such situations. Also, we did
not want to increase the power usage while in battery mode! This does
mean that the drive lifetime still becomes shorter, but since
battery-mode usage is limited by battery life span, required recharge
times, and general usage patterns, this is already a much safer
situation. (This is, however, not configurable. If you want that,
install laptop-mode-tools and let that handle it. The acpi-support fix
detects if laptop-mode-tools handles it, and leaves it to
laptop-mode-tools in that case.)

Cheers,
Bart

-- 
High frequency of load/unload cycles on some hard disks may shorten lifetime
https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/59695
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